TIME IS CHANGING, in the early nineties Galerie Isy
Brachot was showing Marcel Broodthaers mussel pots, egg-shell panels and plastic
poetry plates in his gallery in Avenue Louise. The richness of contrasts and polarities
in Broodthaers poetry and assemblages had quite some impact on me. The empty
coalmine is the opposite of the chimney, the chimney is the negative of the
smoke from the burning coal that comes from inside the earth. Feu, fumée,
nuage. The same with a potato which is the beholder of the frites, the 26
letters in the alphabet which are the smallest elements to build words with,
words to construct sentences. The backed brick to build a building, the mussel
with an air bulb on the bottom of the sea is the negative of the sea.
Broodthaers is a teacher teaching about potential content. A museum of the
nineteenth century with empty picture crates, containers of belief or irony, furniture
to make the museum visitor comfortable. His poetry album ‘Mon livre d’ogre’
didn’t sell, the artist put it in plaster and made a sculpture of it, which
didn’t sell either. A poem about throwing art-works on the market of Cologne
like you do with throwing fish on the market of Cologne. A ship in a storm on
the sea…

I was drenched with Broodthaers at that time, and it was
one of the reasons to move to Brussels, to find a place and to discover / to see
if Brussels had a Broodthaers impact. In 1994, living in Rue Blaes in the centre
of Brussels, Marcel’s phantom was in the windows of the shops, in the language
of the street: Rue René Magritte Straat. Broodthaers daughter ran a gallery
right in opposite of Palais Des Beaux Arts: Galerie Des Beaux Arts. The golden
tomb of James Lee Byars was there on display with the artist Byars lying in his
tomb. My first primitive catalogue I gave to her, the daughter of Marcel
Broodthaers: ‘Etude sur l’ouie et la vue’, a simple booklet full of Marcel’s
influence which Marie-Puck didn’t notice.

Broodthaers Camel in the entrance of Palais Des Beaux
Arts in 1974, to open a group show with his ‘Jardin d’Hiver’. The plan was to
loan a zebra for the opening performance, but zebras are much to wild.
Broodthaers had the graphic black and white skin of the zebra in mind, perhaps
the slow and staid calm camel is metaphorically better than a zebra for a post-colonial
‘Jardin d’Hiver’.

A Winter Garden then, at that time, today a Summer Bar
and three wall drawings. A homage to Marcel Broodthaers, dedicated to him and
inspired by Calcutta in India and by this Palais Des Beaux Arts by Victor
Horta.

In the rotunda the Hindu God Kali is looking, gazing
at the come and go in this Bozar beehive. The second drawing ‘Zebra’ with black
Chinese ink is a homage to Marcel. And the one here, the third wall drawing
fits in the diagonal floor grid from Victor Horta’s building. The convex and
concave tiles in three sizes evoke the gaps between street tile patterns seen
in Kolkata.

In this third drawing Broodthaers, Kolkata India and
Horta meet through (1) the diagonal grid from Horta, (2) the tiles from Kolkata
and (3) the gaps in between as left-over space, shaped emptiness, the fold as a
Marcel Broodthaersalien idiom.

Thank you Sophie Lauwers to invite me, thanks to
Adeline d'Ursel and Pauline Hatzigeorgiou the organisers of the Art on Paper Fair who helped create
the opportunity, thanks to Evelyne Hinque and the many members of the Bozar
technical equipe. And many thanks to the four assistants helping with the
drawings, Delphine Plas, Lana Schneider, Ines Claus and Maika Pieters. Their
handwriting is in the drawings; it was an intense experience to draw these
drawings in two weeks’ time.